Attached Link: http://msnbc.com/news/553372.asp

DURING THE PAST SIX MONTHS, police or corporate lawyers have moved against alleged software pirates in 20 countries, industry officials say. The motivation for Microsoft, by far the biggest victim of software piracy, is clear: During the past year, about five million units of Microsofts products, valued at about $1.7 billion, were seized. Other companies pushing for more aggressive international action include Adobe Systems Inc., Autodesk Inc. and Corel Corp. ******************************************** It's ABOUT TIME something is really done about this...

Does this mean they will stop stealin' stuff from Apple & everyone else who has a good idea?

This post is for the debat section, not for this one. I would that this forum stops to talk about everything. If i go in this forum, it's for poser not for Microsoft !!!!! And i fed up with guys who make publicity for their products in this forum. It's a forum to discuss about poser, i thought !!! Why not a different forum to sell poser products ?

Yes. You are right Bald3. Moving this to C&D. ScottA

Um, tell them to go and look up "warez" on any search engine; that should keep them more than busy for sometime to come....

My previous response was somewhat tounge-in-cheeck. It's OK for corporations to raid each others ideas, people & consumers But don't do that to them! However, I whole-heartlily agree that warez-tradeind is a crime & is bad for us "paying" folks. Besides, two wrongs don't make a right. I'm glad to see people banned for promoting illegal goods.

Ahh, but willf, you conveniently forget that Apple (Steve Jobs) 'stole' the idea of the mouse driven windowed GUI from Xerox. It was somewhat churlish of him and his supporters to get all bent out of shape when Microsoft 'stole' it from them. 'Hey, we stole it first!'

I for one got a good laugh from your comment, willf. It is conflict of interest on a grand scale. A giant near-monopoly like Microsoft needs to stay the hell out of the law-enforcement business. ALL laws should be strictly enforced by the proper authorities and changed if they are bad, but giving Microsoft the power to prosecute software piracy criminals is sort of like having people arrested for bribery by cops on the take. :O)

PJF, Jobs didn't steal GUI. Xerox couldn't wait to get rid of it. The technology transfer was done out in the open with the consent of both parties involved. Yes, the original GUI designers didn't like it, but they had previously signed over their intellectual property rights to Xerox to do with as it wished. Legally that is nothing like "software piracy." Gates on the other hand...

I know he didn't steal the idea of the graphical user interface. That's why I wrote it thus: 'stole'. Microsoft didn't steal it either. They just copied it. That's like saying Ford stole the idea of using a 4 step internal combustion engine in an automobile from Daimler. While I'm convinced that Microsoft are a dodgy outfit; I'm unconvinced that Apple are any different. I'm certainly not taking willf's comment seriously. But it has to be said that Appleism is a religion; and you know how I feel about religion. ;-)

PJF wrote: "I'm certainly not taking willf's comment seriously. But it has to be said that Appleism is a religion; and you know how I feel about religion. ;-)" LOL! Agreed. The person I feel most sorry for is that one hard-working yet clueless programmer who sold his rickety disk operating system to a fledgling Microsoft for peanuts. He's like the Pete Best of the Microcomputer invasion. :O)

When I was a young teenager, I stole this most awesome pair of French sunglasses from this guy who was visiting a girlfriend of mine. I was so cool in those shades, they made me all that and a bag of chips................ Then some bastard had the gaul to steal them from ME!! I was soooo pissed off, I felt violated!! Can you believe it? Davo

It's 9/10 of the law doncha know. :O)

Hehehehe, this is sooo funny! It really truly is...

{Microsoft didn't steal it either. } Technically, Apple had members on the Xerox design team. Microsoft hired some of them away from Apple, as well as some of Xerox's original programmers. They no more "stole" it than, Amazon.com stole Wall-mart employees a coupe of years back... It's just business as usual. {The person I feel most sorry for is that one hard-working yet clueless programmer who sold his rickety disk operating system to a fledgling Microsoft for peanuts. } The guy who created Unix was contracted by IBM to produce DOS. Unfortunately, he had not signed the contract and when IBM, in a rush to get to market, came to his house to get the contract signed correctly, he was out of town for a few days, and his wife REFUSED to sign in his name - so IBM went to the house down the street, where a young programmer named Bill Gates lived (who had bid on DOS as well, but who's inexperience had cost him the contract), and told him that if he could promise deliver, he had the job. He did, and the rest is history.

Actually, the guy who wrote the first GUI wrote it for the Atari ST4, he then went on to develop Apple's GUI which, in the beginning, was extremely similar to the Atari GUI. Where his ideas came from, I can't say. I only know that Atari was the first to have a very primitive GUI. And I only know that because my first computer was an Atari ST4 and I studied the history of Atari computing. The only reason there aren't Atari computers now (tho many people still use the ST4s) is because Atari screwed the pooch big time. They created the 64 bit Jaguar gaming console, and got it into all the walmarts and kmarts and stuff, but oops, they forgot to develop anygames for it. The failure of the Jaguar bankrupted them, and the company was purchased by the owners of Commodore. Yeah that was a good deal lol. The Atari ST4 was actually a rather good machine, for its time. More what we think of as a genuine computer than the Commodore and other machines were at the time. And yes, the GUI did open up primitive windows.

CharlieBrown wrote: "so IBM went to the house down the street, where a young programmer named Bill Gates lived (who had bid on DOS as well, but who's inexperience had cost him the contract), and told him that if he could promise deliver, he had the job. He did, and the rest is history." And the guy Bill Gate's company went to to get their OS was the poor slob I was talking about. What he sold to Gates for peanuts, made Gate his first 20 million. :O)

{And the guy Bill Gate's company went to to get their OS was the poor slob I was talking about. } I THINK that came later - I believe Gates himself did DOS 1.0, but then farmed it out for 2.0+ and the finally usable 3.x (by then he had the money TO hire other people!).

If you call it writing when Gates merely changed enough things to make it "legal." What follows is a bit of the story that can be found here: http://inventors.about.com/science/inventors/library/weekly/aa033099.htm?iam=dpile&terms=%2Bmicrosoft+%2Bhistory *IBM tried to contact Kildall for a meeting, executives met with Mrs. Kildall who refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. IBM soon returned to Bill Gates and gave Microsoft the contract to write the new operating system, one that would eventually wipe Kildall's CP/M out of common use. *The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, for their prototype Intel 8086 based computer. *QDOS was based on Gary Kildall's CP/M, Paterson had bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks, QDOS was different enough from CP/M to be considered legal. *Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a secret from Seattle Computer Products. *Gates then talked IBM into letting Microsoft retain the rights, to market MS DOS separate from the IBM PC project, Gates proceeded to make a fortune from the licensing of MS-DOS.

Actually I misspoke. Gates didn't write a single thing. He just bought it from Patterson who patterned his product after Kildall.

Ah. I stand corrected. As often happens, my sources were incomplete!

What we need is a virus that is so complicated no one understands how it actually works, which causes your computer to freeze and crashes at least once a day, and which forces you to reformat your hard drive at least once or twice a year. Oh wait, that's windows. My bad.

Sorry to all for warping the thread with my big ten inch URL. :Oo

"Actually I misspoke. Gates didn't write a single thing. He just bought it from Patterson who patterned his product after Kildall." Copied is more like it. The only difference: A:_ vs. C:_

Why do I feel like such an outsider when it comes to windows?? I personally have very little problems with Windows. Well WinNT that is. I think it's a great OS for my purposes. I don't do that 98/me stuff. I have heard nightmares about the 9x series.

Win2K is Windows NT with the 98 interface. 98 is a bug fix/patch/update for 95 which is, essentially, a shell for DOS 7. WindowsME is a brok... er UPDATED version of Win98, again essentially a bug fix/patch/update, but I hear it's generally INFERIOR to Win98SE (Second Edition). Windows3.x was the first usable interface MS came up with since DOS 2.x; before 3.0 and the advent of the 486 CPU, Windows was an utterly useless piece of crap; now it is a USEFUL piece of crap... :-)

WIN98 is a thirty-two bit upgrade, to a sixteen bit patch, on an eight bit shell, for a four bit operating system, made by a two-bit company that can;t stand one bit of competition. S

.

Well the uptime on my Win 98se is at 64:57:14 right now. Basically I try to leave it on all the time, the only problems are with IE(rare) and Windows Media Player(Crash-o-Matic). NT(W2K and it's predecessors) is basically regular Windows with a different file system and the brakes applied for stability(it spoonfeeds system resources to programs). I like 95sr2, 98, and 98se as much as I hated 95a and NT 3.x(4.0 I can tolerate but it is so slooow). Haven't tried W2K(had a copy of beta r3 not the final), going to wait on Whistler or XP or whatever they call it these days. As for ME, I have seen it on a couple of machines, one is stable, the other is a little shakey. "before 3.0 and the advent of the 486 CPU, Windows was an utterly useless piece of crap" I had an Everex(sic?) 386 that I paid about $3700 for at the time and tried to run Win, I could take short naps waiting for it to do anything. DOS, on the other hand, flew like the wind.

XP is the program formerly known as Whistler (an attempt to meld the Consumer - or Win9x - and Professional - NT Kernal - flavors of Windows into one, single OS). Win2K is good unless you have legacy peripherals (my modem and sound card are not supported!) W95Sr2 was really good - better, even than Win98, but Win98SE and Win2K are the only "good" OSSes that MS has on the market right now, IMO. Well, aside from DOS, that is... ;-)

As long as we're on the 'trivia' leads here.. Anyone remember PET computers ? Or how Commodore got it's name ? starts to really show his age.. or at least how long he's been play'in with these damn things. :) - Rim

PET computers, anything like Pet Rocks? :-) I have no clue about Commodore either...

Anybody else ever had an Ohio Scientific ? <8^0) "Or how Commodore got it's name ?" "But why the name Commodore? According to Tramiel, he wanted a company name that had a military ring, and of course General and Admiral had long since been taken." "Anyone remember PET computers ?" "Personal Electronic Transactor" Something that I have never been able to get over, went from a C64 to an Amiga. Then to an Apple and PC, both of which cost much more and didn't do color or sound.

Here is a link to some info on PET (first Commodore "computer") http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cp2001.html 1977 :) "The design of the Commodore PET 2001 was born from the mind and 6502 processor of Mr. Chuck Peddle, an engineer for the former MOS Technologies. He was able to talk Jack Tramiel into giving the home computer market a try. Tramiel agreed, and in 1977, Commodore announced that the world's first fully-assembled home computer would soon be available to consumers, though mail order was the only distribution method in the initial months following its release." Had the pleasure of "working" on one of these in 7th grade math class. :) but had already been exposed to TRS Model 1's and other such 'toys' a year or two prior.

I started with a TRash 80. it had a 2-track cassette deck for loading my proggies in basic. my monitor doubled as a portable tv with rabbit ears and a tuner dial that only went to 13.

I remember reading an old popular science magazine about the first ever home computer. It was called the Adair or something like that. You put it together yourself and instead of a keyboard it was a big silver box with a bunch of on off switches on the front. Gawd only knows what it actually did, but evidently it could actually compute something. IF you could actually get it put together and understand a thing about it afterwards

It should be "Altair". By the way, since we are talking about Microsoft, Piracy, and Altair, I though this "article" might be of interests to some of us: http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html ;) Regards, Kelvin

with the Altair the person flipping the switches became the software. it resulted in about .000002 computations per second. we've come a long way baby!

I think we should have a global attack against Microsoft, I don't greatly enjoy typing in 30 character CD-Keys because Bill thinks it might protect his software against piracy (I work on computers in my regular job, I install a lot of software). First stage is don't use Microsoft products when you don't have to, I'm still using Netscape, Netscape 3 most of the time, in fact.

Attached Link: http://www.rsalsbury.co.uk/roughdraft/

I use windows cause hey, nothing's better yet, I use win media player cause I absolutely hate realplayer even worse than microsoft, and I'm forced to use ms word simply because many places won't accept word perfect docs, tho I hugeley prefer word perfect. Microsoft makes good products, but they're overpriced and I really don't care for their business practices and attitudes. Though lately, as far as word processing, I've become quite addicted to a very small, freeware word processor called Rough Draft. It allows me to spellcheck with an british dictionary, which I prefer, it has set ups for screenplays and some other formats, and it will output simple HTML files. It doesn't have the options of WP or Word, but man, it's a damn good word processor that I like a lot. The download is 1.62 megs and it doesn't suck up hard drive space. It outputs in RTF or TXT format so anyone can read the files. If you want to try it I've included the URL for the home page here. I highly recommend it. It's an example of what good programming should be.